Installing Nvidia drivers 313.18 on Fedora 18

As you might know Nvidia released the Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD driver 313.18 about a month ago, but the main non-free Fedora compatible repository still offers the old 304.64 driver (released in Nov 2012), not even the most recent from the 310.xx branch is available. As it turns out, Nvidia removed support for older cards from the GeForce 6 and 7 series starting with 310.xx so the RPMfusion package builders need to find a way to deal with that without harassing its users too much.

I too was using the 304.xx driver from the RPMfusion repository but decided to switch to the latest driver to get better performance. I found a good guide to achieve that but it didn’t work for me. I had already disabled the nouveau driver (actually kmod-nvidia seems to be doing that automatically now) and I also had all dependencies installed (e.g. kernel-devel, gcc, dkms) but the Nvidia installer failed each time, with or without the dkms option.

Searching the errors on the Internet I found there was an issue with Nvidia installers and 3.7 kernels. This is what I had to do to overcome it:

[code lang=”bash”]

cd /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include/linux
sudo ln -s ../generated/uapi/linux/version.h .

[/code]

After running that the Nvidia installer worked without errors. I could successfully compile the driver and add it to dkms so that the driver will be automatically recompiled by dkms when newer kernels are installed and booted. I did encountered one minor issue though, after the installation and reboot I couldn’t get nvidia-xconfig to run properly. It didn’t open due to missing dependencies. That was easily fixed with:

[code lang=”bash”]

sudo yum install pangox-compat

[/code]

 

Screenshots:

 

The new driver kicks ass! I almost doubled the FPS in Serious Sam 3 BFE, here are some comparison screens.

Additional info:

 

• Nvidia Unix releases
• Nvidia FTP repository for Linux / FreeBSD drivers
• Nvidia README for the 313.18 driver
• Install Nvidia drivers on Fedora 18 howto